Fifth Drift - Virtual
As confirmation of the fact that opportunities can be hidden behind problems, this fifth drift has a virtual nature.
I thought about doing this experiment, forced not to move and not able to use the camera due to an accident that temporarily blocked my right arm.
The experiment is inspired by the work of some visual artists, such as the painter Bill Guffey and photographers Jon Rafman, Michael Wolf and Doug Rickard, who have used Google Streetview as a basis for their body of work. I researched them further in Flâneuring by Google Streetview.
I think this way of working has analogies with that of "found photography", where photographs, that were not originally intended as art, have been given new aesthetic meaning by an artist's eye.
In this key, even the virtual drift that I performed provided me with different experiences and stimuli from those that one receives while physically wandering with one's device for representing reality (the camera).
First of all, the link between one's own time, place (hic et nunc = here and now) and the image produced is lost: the outcome comes from a universe where the image (reality) already exists, has its own time and place, is tied to that time, and in that time nothing changes. It is the antithesis of what was established by Heraclitus, who stated that the reality around us is constantly changing ("panta rei").
With the camera we freeze a moment (hic et nunc) of a continuous and infinite flow of life. In my drift, accomplished via Streetview in January 2023, I fictitiously froze a reality already frozen almost ten years earlier, in June 2013.
Another paradigm then emerges, which diverges from both found photography and traditional photography: the point of view and composition are neither the obligatory ones of found photography nor the personalized ones of traditional photography. The "nine eyes" of the photographic sphere of Google allow a certain freedom of selection among a set, however limited, of points of view and fields of vision, but not of composition.
In my experience, I spent a lot of time choosing my point of view so that it adhered to a minimal composition that I wanted: this concept opens the field to personal interpretations of wanting to get the image you want, even if with large and frustrating restrictions on freedom of expression.
However, I can say that this experiment was positive and stimulated me to reflect on how the relationship between me and the reality that surrounds me can be "transformed" through the manipulation of time and interfere substantially with our senses, further mediator, as well as the camera, between us and the world around us.